I must admit that I am not a fundamentalist myself, nor am I sure I will ever become one. But I try to advocate open access, and as much as possible I follow the first two steps below. In addition, I have set up a free site for anyone to publish according to step 3 which is sciphu.com (but any site will do…..ideally one using widely accepted publication identifiers – sciphu.com isn’t…yet).

Following the recommendations in step 1 and 2 makes you a supporter and Open Access activist. Following recommendations in step 3 will make you a full-fledged Open Access Fundamentalist…….

1. Supporter stage. Openly support initiatives like PloS and contribute to activities like Open Access day.

2. Activist stage.

a) Publish in Open Access journals as much as possible.

b) Mail authors for reprints. Whenever you need an article published in a pay-for-access journal, write to the corresponding author asking for a reprint. Even if you have access through your institutional subscription (or get it through friends and colleagues), write the author to notify him/her that the paper is not open access. This increases awareness….

3. Fundamentalist stage. Send in your paper to be peer reviewed like you normally would (preferably to a pay-for-access journal). Receive your reviewer comments, edit according to those comments, but do not send your manuscript back to the journal. Rather, publish on freely accessible web page. Include the peer-reviews if you want, but clear this with the reviewers first.

Image by asher taken from Elephantitis of the mind

Everyone should have access to the same scientific information (what that information should be is the subject of another post). It’s not even about who pays for it. It is science, and as such belongs to everyone.

This post is my entry for Open Access Day 2008. It is about blogging, peer-review publishing, open access, elitism, prejudice and exclusion.

I had this dream: publishing directly on the web mixed with interactive comments to individual publications was to replace traditional peer-reviewed publishing in scientific journals. I set up SciPhu.com to achieve this. The core idea was (and still is) that any publication would remain fluid in its format and content since communication with referees was continuous and interactive. By letting the publication evolve in this way it should asymptote towards perfect.

Inspiration of how a series of comments can serve to paint the whole picture, I took from posts (and their comment-threads) like Anna Koushnir’s post on female scientists (where the comments are sometimes borderline harassment, but the comments taken together as a whole, nails the relevant issues, I think) and Olivia Judson’s post “The monster is back” (I could have taken any post with more than say -10- comments)……

I realize now that I was a bit naive in believing this could completely replace a system that has worked so well for so long. The system has after all allowed the scientific community to retain an unsurpassed credibility, worldwide.

But……..I am not accepting defeat just yet, because traditional peer-review publishing has it’s problems.

Firstly, most articles published are not open access. That means that if you need a scientific article and you do not work in an institution that has paid a large amount of money for subscription to the given journal (or you have a private subscription) you will not be able to access it (you can pay for individual articles, but that will become very expensive over time). In contrast, blog publishing would be free and accessible to all. The cost of publishing on a blog is very low indeed. It does not need printing and it will not need conventional employees. Editors and peer-reviewers (those who comment) would all be doing work on a volunteer basis. Consequently, no need to charge the readers,…….- at least not for scientific use (commercial use could potentially have a different set of rules).

Secondly, traditional paper-publishing is painstakingly slow and, compared to web-publishing, extremely inefficient. Blogs and scientific news-sites can publish in a matter of minutes and provide continuous updates (and corrections) on almost any topic. Also, web-publishing allows you to track your readers in an unprecedented way, – and most importantly, it provides a feedback channel for them. This feedback I think is essential in the next era of publishing. It does however, need some structure. The commenting anarchy of today will not suffice.

Thirdly, – the complete lack of such anarchy, has been one the strengths of the traditional peer-review model. But, to such an extent has peer-review been controlled that it has become the opposite of anarchy, namely dictatorship. Reviewers are handpicked by the publishers, creating potential old boy networks, with the journal editors as presidents. To add to this, reviewers are usually anonymous, potentially masking any conflicts of interest, be it financial, work-related or personal. In addition editors and peer reviewers tend to have agenda’s different to those who submit their papers. Thus, the traditional system does not serve to get as much quality scientific information out as possible, – this is contrary to the intentions. Below, I’ll quote from a discussion I had with (editor) T Ryan Gregory, to illustrate elitism, prejudice and exclusion, as examples of editor-agendas (comments from this genomicron post):

1. Elitism

My concern is that publish first, comment second represents an easy way around the rigors of review by experts in which publication is dependent on positive reviews and revision. I am all for open discussion, but initiatives started by people who don’t publish much in the peer-reviewed literature or do not themselves review many manuscripts do not really appeal to me because it adds to my sense of concern that this is a backdoor. I am not trying to seem elitist, I am just saying that peer review, for all its problems, is there for a reason. Submitted by T Ryan Gregory on 22 May 2008 – 8:10am.

2. Prejudice

May I ask what your record is in terms of reviewing manuscripts and publishing peer reviewed articles?  Submitted by T Ryan Gregory on 22 May 2008 – 9:00am.

One might also be forgiven for thinking that someone with only a few publications might be looking to skip the hard (but necessary) stage of getting through reviewers. Isn’t it a bit odd to complain about the anonymous nature of peer review while moderating a “review” blog anonymously? Submitted by T Ryan Gregory on 22 May 2008 – 9:00am.

3. Exclusion

Peer review isn’t supposed to be democratic. It is supposed to be done by peers — a set of individuals with highly specific knowledge in a particular field. The democratic part comes only once the paper gets through that filter, when it is made accessible to the entire community. Peer review is a vetting process, not a rating process. Submitted by T Ryan Gregory on 22 May 2008 – 9:42am.

By now I have concluded that SciPhu or similar blog-publishing alternatives is not going to replace traditional publishing, and that other alternatives will have to. Blogs can/will however, still be a valuable addition to traditional publishing, perhaps serving to correct some of the flaws:

Some other views on peer review: nature debate on peer review, Certifying Online Research

This is what I have been planning: SciPhu is supposed to develop into a certification site for scientific thoughts, ideas and data. It is supposed to gather a large community of competent reviewers from virtually any scientific field. These reviewers are supposed to provide thorough peer-reviews of any scientific presentation as requested for evaluation on SciPhu.com. A successful review is supposed to give the author(s) a stamp to put on their presentation as a guarantee for scientific quality and credibility.

Through a FriendFeed discussion (original post by Bill Hooker) I came across this commentary on the problems of evaluating online publications. The author, Gary A. Olson, presents some solutions that are very similar to the principles I’ve worked out for Sciphu.

Clearly, the scholarly community needs to devise a way to introduce dependability into the world of electronic scholarship. We need a process to certify sites so that we all can distinguish between one that contains reliable material and one that may have been slapped together by a dilettante. We need to be able to ascertain if we can rely on a site for our own scholarship and whether we should give credit toward a colleague’s tenure and promotion for a given site.

And he proposes to establish certification bodies to achieve these goals.

The major professional and scholarly organizations in each discipline should (devise a certification process in which a site owner can apply to have a site reviewed and recognized, perhaps for a nominal processing fee. The site would be subjected to a formal and rigorous review by peers in the disciplinary area covered by the site.

Which is a very good description of what I wanted SciPhu to be like (except for maybe the fee, which should be for commercial users only). I have taken the liberty to replace with SciPhu in relevant places in the rest of these bullet points (the original text in brackets):

• Only those sites meeting the highest standards should be awarded certification.
• Once a site wins certification from SciPhu (the national scholarly society), it should be permitted to display that stamp of approval prominently.
• The certification should remain in effect for a specific and limited amount of time (since a site can change rapidly and without notice). The site should regularly seek renewal of its certification.
• SciPhu (Each disciplinary organization) should issue a resolution recommending that departments construe certification of a site as indicating that it has met the highest standards of scholarship.
• SciPhu (Each organization) should maintain an online registry of certified sites.

A central site accessible to all is much more efficient than local evaluation bodies. Also the potential to gather a large collection of qualified referees is present only on a truly international site. Such a broad site would also be able to satisfy the open-access requirements in our Web/Science 2.0 future.

The SciPhu blog was set up as a starting point to gather a community of peer-reviewers. Making the blog successful is going to take a long time however, and given this commentary as well as the current interest in different publishing models, it seems wise to try and speed up.

To do this I need help. I need help setting up a good site, – a wiki perhaps. I also need help advertising this to the broader Scientific community and recruit referees. Even with help, achieving success is not going to be a stroll in the park. But without help it is going to be near impossible.

The end result may not end up as originally planned: names, concepts and strategies may/will change on the way, but I strongly believe that this is a path worth traveling.

I also think that Gary A. Olson is to narrowminded when it comes to requirements and scope of such a certification. Doing this online with a large community of referees makes it possible to get peer-review very quickly because reviewers would be accessible around the world 24-7. And there is no reason to limit such reviews to scientific publications. Any news-piece, advertisement or company information with scientific content could get reviewing through a SciPhu-like site. Extending reviewing to non-scientific publication forums is also the commercial opportunity, or business model if you will.

If you are interested in starting a broad and open-minded collaboration on this (and I really hope you are), please leave a comment, send me a mail or even better, join and use The Life Scientists room on FriendFeed for further discussions.

Here’s what I have experienced while blog-publishing:

1. It is fast. I decided I would publish some data that I already had presented in a talk, since this data wasn’t really fit for a major article. It took me an hour or so to write up and publish the whole thing.

2. One of the reasons it is fast is that it is less rigid in its form. You yourself decide on formatting, wording, whether to use a reference list and how to format this list, or if you would rather have your references as hyperlinks in the text.

3. Papers published on SciPhu.com get hits from google searches. Since the whole text is searchable the hit-probability for people looking for your subject is higher than that on pubmed or any other site where searches are based on title, abstract and keywords. An example is the gel-drying paper which is hit daily by google searches like “SDS-PAGE cracking” or “vacuum drying PAGE” or similar. Although in this case, you could surely search laboratory method web-sites, the fastest way to find your information is probably a google search. This means that any paper published like this has the potential of high visibility. In addition you can get day by day hit statistics, which is probably interesting to many.

4. Communication with referees is interactive and the paper can remain fluid in its format and content. Since publishing like this is rapid it is also bound to be more error-prone. But, by interacting through the comments section, the paper can be continuously revised to correct errors or unclear phrasings. Also the number of referees can be many and since everyone can see the referee-comments, replying to these referees can be done by anyone, not only the authors. Thus, the papers will be less perfect to start off, but may end up better than those in a traditional peer review journal.

5. It is open access and free to everyone. Anyone’s welcome to publish anything as long as it is scientific. This is true scientific democracy.

7. SciPhu.com lacks the “rigid editor” entry point, and it always will.

This publishing solution is not very high tech (but, it may evolve to be), it does not enjoy the recognition that many of the high ranked science journals do (but with active commenting, it can).

As with so many other things in professional life, the potential lies in the numbers. Only if many of us scientists are willing to use publishing channels like these, will it become a success.

This is the age of the web and no-limit communication accessible to all. My recommendation is: Say goodbye to the stale publishing standards of yesterday and come participate in the interactive self-justice of web-publishing.

SciPhu= Science + Phusis

Phusis – An Ancient Greek word often translated as birth or nature (Wikipedia).

SciPhu.com is a blog based, open access and unrestricted publishing model. A hybrid in the spirit of Wikipedia and JustScience.

The idea behind SciPhu-publishing was to be able to publish and peer-review scientific information more efficiently than standard peer-reviewing. We wanted the reviewing process while retaining its scientific credibility, to be faster and less rigid. The answer, we found, is blogger-reviewing (which in this setting is just a fancy name for commenting on blog posts). Blogging is a good starting point since there are so many knowledgeable bloggers out there. While SciPhu may still be developed into a proper web-portal of some sort, the blog based starting point is now launched.

The end goal of SciPhu is to be able to quality control scientific information from any source, so that the twisted reality that sometimes ends up in the popular press (and ultimately in public opinion) can be promptly countered with proper accessible scientific information.

On the way towards this goal, we would like to provide a novel publishing channel for the scientific community. A way of publishing that is completely free of (any kind of) charge, less rigid, more efficient and more interactive than existing publishing models. SciPhu publishing is unlimited open-access and has the potential to reach a broad audience. At the same time, SciPhu aims be a pivotal tool to keep scientific authority intact, free and unpolitical.

Without input from (a lot of) you however, this effort will fail. Therefore, please feel free to contribute scientific content, recommend to friends and collegues or just come by to review/rate someone else’s work.

Invitation:

You are cordially invited to:

• Write (blog) your own scientific article (or a review of a scientific topic).
• Referee articles written by others.
• Participate in scientific publishing in a new format.

You are invited to visit and join the SciPhu publishing community.